Ice Concepts creates cool art in time for New Year's Eve

By Naila FrancisStaff Writer

Monday

Dec 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMDec 30, 2013 at 12:15 AM

Last year, it was a throne of snakes.

For this New Year's Eve, Kevin Gregory will be chipping and shaving away at blocks of ice to ultimately reveal a horse, the Chinese zodiac sign that will govern 2014 — and the symbol for First Night Burlington County.

The ice sculptor has been providing the New Year's Eve celebration in Mount Holly with frozen figures befitting its annual theme for the past four years. On Monday, he will begin carving his equine throne at the Historic Prison Museum on High Street as a prelude to the festivities.

But First Night isn't the only project keeping the award-winning sculptor busy at this time of year. Gregory, who owns Ice Concepts in Hatfield with his wife, Lisa, has been going at a gelid gallop since Thanksgiving. That's when demand for the statuary he conceives with lead carver Antonio Young picks up, and the pace is brisk through New Year's Eve.

"We can't keep up. It’s either feast or famine," said Young during a recent visit to the Hatfield ice shop, where he was putting the finishing touches on a champagne bottle with the cork popping out for a New Year's Eve party at an area country club.

The design is one of many, from sculptures of Father Time to New Year's babies that are frost-bound for the dawning of 2014.

"We also do a lot of odd themes that have nothing to do with New Year's. It just happens to be the theme of the party they're having that year," said Gregory. "Anything and everything — it's all in the mix."

At Ice Concepts’ 7,000-square-foot facility, a small team oversees the production of chiseled art from more than 1,000 pounds of ice. The shop makes and stores its own blocks — each weighing 300 pounds — and projects, carved in temperature-controlled rooms, can require anywhere from a single to 50 blocks. Designs are programmed into a CNC machine, which gives rough shape to about 75 percent of projects produced before the finishing touches are applied by hand. The other 25 percent are hand-carved from beginning to end.

"I love that this is a very fast medium," said Gregory, who discovered a passion for ice sculpting while pursuing a career in the culinary arts. "Back in the day, before there were professional organizations doing ice-carving, it was mostly a chef who would do ice sculptures.

"The fact that I can start with a raw block of ice and within an hour, I have a rough shape — I'm a very impatient person, and that's very satisfying to me. With a day's work, you can step back and really see what you've accomplished."

He honed his skills with a culinary apprenticeship at The Balsams, a New Hampshire resort, in the early '90s. Young would eventually complete the same program, and four years after Gregory started Ice Concepts in 1993, while still employed as a chef at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia, he brought him on. They’ve since become one of the region’s premier providers of ice sculpture, fashioning works from corporate logos to functional pieces like food stations and ice bars and sculptures that dazzle with their form.

They've created pieces for the Super Bowl and for Major League Baseball, for governors and for local CEOS. And their many accolades include competing three times in the Winter Olympics and taking home the 2009 championship title from the National Ice Carving Association's annual competition. Yet even after 20 years in the business, the two remain Ice Concepts' primary carvers.

"It allows me to be creative," said Young, who tapped a similar vein in the culinary arts.

Yet the job is not without its challenges.

"Ice is very unforgiving. You don't have hours to sit there and refine a cheek or a cheekbone. Once you take something away, you can't add it back," said Gregory.

Additionally, circumstances don't always cooperate. Consider the room of ice they had to build over two and a half days for a function at the University of Pennsylvania last January. Temperatures soared to 70 degrees on the second day with soaking rains and a tornado warning as winds gusted up to 50 miles an hour.

"It was ridiculous,” said Gregory. “We built the room and covered it in quilts and tarps and dry-iced it. The temperature dropped on Thursday, and it was just about freezing when it was time for the event to begin."

He's experienced the other extreme, as well, working at 35 degrees below zero during his first time at the World Ice Championships in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2007, where he collaborated with world-renowned ice sculptor Junichi Nakamura. They worked 17-hour days for six days straight in the frigid outdoors carving a large goldfish titled "Aqua Queen" from 50,000 pounds of ice.

"The warmest temperature that week was five above (zero). Our tools were frozen. Our bodies were frozen. It was just absolutely brutal," said Gregory.

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